So that’s it then. Ten weeks have literally flown by (as they so often do) and it’s time to look back on what I’ve learned from the course. I’ve learned a lot in the last ten weeks, though admittedly many of the technical things like Google Analytics, click-through-rates and metatags are less relevant to me and have been difficult to fully understand. However, I’ve found the course to be unbelievably helpful in other respects – networking for one.

In a way I feel like a bit of an anomaly. I’m not the kind of person you might expect to find on a search and social media marketing course. We’re all on the course for different reasons though.  I mean, I don’t own a business, I don’t work for a company nor do I consider myself particularly professional.  I’m not the most technically gifted of people and my sales technique is awful. And yet, despite my lack of business acumen, I’m coming away from this course far better off than when I started and with a clearer line-of-sight as to where I want to take my career.

As for this blog post, well, how can I put it into words to describe my experience? Maybe I should stick to what I know – telling a story. As a journalist it’s what I’ve been trained to do. Though, to give a better understanding of where I’m at now, as a graduate of SSMM, I first need to put things into context.

Sadly, it’s not a story with the most positive of beginnings.  2012 began with me entering my fifth month on the dole and life had come to a standstill. I was going nowhere. I decided to leave Leeds, my home for the previous 7 years, and return to Manchester to study for my NCTJ.  It’s probably the best decision I’ve ever made. I retrained and refocused. I opened doors for myself that were once shut and pledged there and then never to walk into a Jobcentre Plus…ever again.

Retraining as a journalist brought me up to speed with writing online; writing SEO-friendly headlines, writing to an industry standard, making use of different web apps and social media to construct a story or locate a source, working to tight deadlines, live-blogging, approaching new people, building up a contacts list and learning to nurture each new connection I made.  It also taught me to give myself an online presence – to get on twitter, to get on Linkedin, to utilise social media and write authoritatively. It was a fun time indeed (minus the 13 hours of shorthand a week).

As the old saying goes, what goes up must come down and inevitably the honeymoon period of being a trainee journalist came to an end in July 2012. It was time to look for a real job as a reporter.  This turned out to be more difficult that I‘d imagined. I could blame it on the economy but that’s an easy cop out. Perhaps I didn’t look good enough on paper. Perhaps I just wasn’t trying hard enough. Either way, it was back to the old day-job at the NHS for me until I found a way in.

As the months dragged on with no real openings into a paid reporter’s role I began to question whether that career path was really for me.  I wasn’t writing much at all, and any writing I was doing was voluntary.  Would I still be typing clinical letters this time next year? How much longer would I find myself struggling to listen to medical terminology in broken English?

By this point a friend of mine had been badgering me for some time to come and work for him. He said he could use a good writer to write blogs for him and his clients businesses, as well as do some in-house SEO.  He kept saying ‘content is king’. This slowly started to sink in as I read around the subject more, I began seeing the word ‘content’ everywhere I looked.  I asked myself, can I do content? Can I be the king of content? That’d be nice.

Given that my SEO knowledge was minimal at best, I decided some more tuition was required. I came across the Search and Social Media Marketing course and after a short while deliberating; I booked myself onto the foundation course. It was around this time that I read a very interesting article on the Guardian website. It was all about content marketing and how it’s a good route for journalists to take.

It said that due to the combination of a dying print media undermined by instant communication, coupled with the rise of citizen journalists and bloggers, few qualified journalists actually work in Journalism. It also stated that this route could be more financially secure and the skills gained in a newsroom could be put to good use in a marketing setting. This gave me some real inspiration.

If you’ve gotten this far in my blog, you’re probably thinking…’yeah ok Kev…nice story! What does this have to do with search and social media marketing?’

Well, everything and nothing really.  All the stuff I’ve done in the last year has helped me on the course. Graduating from SSMM is the culmination of my journey thus far. I honestly didn’t envisage myself being here when I walked out of the dole office for the last time.

Learning to network effectively, finding my voice and getting involved in discussion…it’s all made my experience worthwhile. The people on the course and the industry speakers have been brilliant, not only in their advice but in their openness to help me out. Anjlee is week 3 for example informed me of a writers network called Contently, I’d dare say I’d have found out about this without her input. So many doors have opened for me as a result of coming on this course, including some actual paid work through Nikki, the guest speaker in week 2.

And there is more work on the horizon, including working on the website for an independent pharmacy, which is effectively a blank canvass for me to integrate all the SEO stuff I’ve learned from the course.  I can put together the right strategy for the business, primarily looking at how social media can be used to market the different services at the pharmacy.

Who knows where things will spiral from there? But things seem to be working out and that jobcentre plus now seems a million miles away. I really feel I’m doing something good here. It’s current, it’s exciting and I know I can do it.

So that’s my story. Thanks for staying with me through this epic blog post.

Digital Media Social Enterprise

Lets Go Global, currently celebrating our 10th anniversary, is about to become the first Trafford Council service to transition out of the local authority following the Cabinet Office supported Mutual Support Programme (MSP) and is setting up as an independent Social Enterprise. We combine art, education, film-making and digital development and training.

We’re going to be working with Make it Happen consultancy to develop our business and services so that we can create a sustainable future for our team and the work we do.

Search and Social Media Marketing – What is it?

The Search and Social Media Marketing course came at a perfect time for us.

We just started our development process this week and I’m already actively integrating the tools and techniques I learnt on the course into our communications strategy and marketing campaign.

We’ve been using social media quite extensively for some time already, but I came to the course knowing little about Search Engine Optimisation and Search Marketing. I thought SEO was all and only about page ranking in Google and optimising a website.

How wrong I was! While I’m still no SEO expert, I’ve gained a really good understanding of how Search and Social Media Marketing can and must be included in the arc of a communications plan.

Understanding the bigger picture.

From invaluable information about your customers and their user experience on your website, to product placement online and using link building to create a brand profile as well as drive traffic to your site, this course has really informed me about some great tools I can use to enhance our online and offline presence.

We’re relaunching our brand later this year, and we’ve got some great ideas now about a social media campaign leading up to and during our launch events, creating and sharing real-time content, made by us, and by our the event attendees, hopefully creating some really valuable, ‘juicy’ links and a pool of people invested in sharing our news.

We’ve got a new website coming, with the help of FreshSpring – a web developers specialising in customised WordPress themes. It was designed before the course started, but happily, Freshspring are really good at making sure the design & sitemap is SEO friendly, and I can work on getting the copy and website completely optimised and nice and sparkling, ready for launch!

What’s next?

I still feel like I’ve got a lot of homework to do! I need to tackle that reading list – the ‘SEO bible’ – The Arts of SEO – Mastering Search Engine Optimisation is at the top, and I’ll be revisiting the Linkedin site & twitter hashtag #ssmmUoS, which by the way, worked really well.

But I’ve had a glimpse inside the number crunching world of SEO, algorithms, spiders and robots and found out that, after all, it’s all about people.

The internet is everywhere; we have it on our laptops, tablets and phones. We use it watch a film on the train, to shop for groceries from our living rooms and even to check our Facebook profiles before we get out of bed in the morning. So, for anyone looking to sell a product, advertise a service or simply tell the world your thoughts with a blog like this one, knowing how to get people to see what you are about is key to the success of your endeavours.

With this in mind, and combined with the fact that marketing is my bread and butter, I thought it was high time that I brushed up on my skills with a search and social media marketing course that would help drive traffic to the University of Salford website.

Success is in the search

I write a lot of content as part of my job and so personally, I was keen to use this course to get a better understanding of the processes behind creating optimised copy to maximise my SERPs rankings.

I’ve learned a lot about how you can use optimisation tools such as Google Adwords Keyword tool and WordStream in order to generate key words for content and PCC campaigns that can really make a difference to the volume and type of traffic you are attracting to your site. By using these tools to identify appropriate phrases it really is possible to increase traffic through both organic and paid for results rankings.

What your traffic says about your site

If you have ever looked at a page of analytics and had no clue what was going on then I can sympathise, but analytics tools such as Google Analytics are essential to find out more about how well your website is working and who’s looking at it.

For one, if you have just set about optimising your site, you can see exactly how your changes are affecting your traffic in real time. You can how well your landing pages are performing, work out what content is attracting people to your site and what they are doing once they are there.

The optimisation process is always ongoing, you need to tweak, review and tweak again to keep your site at its best and understand what your audience are looking for from your offering. SEO support tools such as SEOmoz can help, offering comprehensive services to keep track on what is going on behind the scenes. This in turn will help to maintain quality traffic and enhance your sales and conversion rates meaning you will (hopefully) start to see a tangible ROI for your time and effort.

It pays to be social

The world of social media can also be a confusing place, especially if you grew up in the days before the internet became a staple of everyday life and the only place you’d ever seen a mobile phone was in a film.

But today, a well co-ordinated social media campaign can really help you to get noticed online. It’s all about creating communities, starting conversations and getting your brand on people’s browsers through continued engagement.

Everyone’s heard of Facebook and Twitter – they are both great platforms where you can create a presence and start to build a following for your brand, but there are many other platforms out there that can be of use. Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Pinterest are just a few examples that can help you to create new communities and expand your existing following.

Putting theory into practice

After completing the search and social media marketing course, I feel it has helped me to consolidate my existing knowledge in these areas and allowed me to take a more co-ordinated and comprehensive approach to social media. The SEO processes I have learned are already helping me to write more effective copy and I have already started to think of new ways to engage with my target markets, such as taking advantage of emerging platforms like Google+.

Moving forward, I am looking forward to developing my new skills and hopefully seeing an improvement in the effectiveness of my online activities, and my continuing to review and refine my activities, I am sure I will be able to see a positive return for my endeavours.

Hi Everyone!

As part of the SSMM course, I have decided to carry out a brief diagnosis of Salford University’s current online brand management from an international recruitment perspective and with a focus on social media engagement.

I am an experienced international marketer with a strong interest in search and social media marketing within an international context, more precisely within the field of Higher education. I started the course hoping that my academic background in intercultural business communication and current work experience would provide me with some foundation and inspiration for the implementation of SSMM to my current field.

Attending the SSMM course has provided me with a more structured approach to online brand management and strategy thanks to the use of key tools at diagnosis stage and planning stages with the confidence that the practical and theoretical elements of the course will strengthen our marcomms plan and enable us to measure our success (for example with regards to qualitative/ quantitative data, campaign tracking, choice of key words, etc).

From a micro perspective, the SSMM course has enhanced the way that I look at content and provided me with the confidence to be more creative to really maximize content use through appropriate campaigns, media channels and more importantly to fulfil different purposes.

For example, embedding some video content in the shape of webinars, or as part of a slideshow would make content more lively and interactive and achieve different goals such as providing an insight on current experiences that international students are having on campus but also showcasing the quality of our teaching and the credentials of our academic team. Releasing this on our own site as well as social media such as Facebook and Youtube would make the content readily available and searchable for prospective international students. Another way to use video content to run short campaigns would be to put a spotlight on our international students’ opinion on a current topic, which could also be beneficial to demonstrate how engaged they are with current affairs, thereby reflecting the key selling point that our courses embed theory with real world issues. The video could be used via our established promotional networks (CRM companies, Agent network) and other social media (Facebook and twitter) where prospective international student will be naturally encouraged/ pre-disposed to comment/ respond.

As international recruitment means engaging and interacting with prospective students from a range of countries ,cultural sensitivity is required and cultural differences apply in terms of social media use. For example, students from India tend to post more statuses and pictures with a spiritual note (sayings, quotes, etc) rather than an update on their daily life as most UK students would. Chinese students typically use Facebook and instagram to illustrate their social lifestyle with pictures of special places they have been to and friends and family associated with the moment. Some prospective students may or may not click on “like” to show their willingness to be associated with a brand just like some may choose to use social media for a more immediate response from a corporation such as the university. I believe this indicates that an informal context such as social media definitely provides a platform where people seek not only responses but also a personal touch, which could in the long run reflect some form of loyalty to the brand (for example, via an alumni group on facebook, shares of pictures post graduation, click and likes , etc…) Understanding how cultural differences apply to the use of Social media will become crucial in our social media engagement strategy.

Age, demographics and other social and economic factors definitely pre-define the way prospective students use social media and this should be reflected in the way we target our international audience and the way we choose to present ourselves digitally. I found the use of HITWISE particularly interesting for that purpose but as any other good tool, there is a price to pay to be able to use it!

Another crucial point would be linguistics and key words, as overseas students may search for the same thing; for example “scholarships” but depending on the country they are from other terms might also be used such as “bursaries” “discount” “award” and there may be local preferences which could affect the SERP from a particular region. Therefore an awareness of preferred search key words is necessary depending on the region targeted.

In terms of the more technical elements of the course, although I did find them useful and interesting to learn about, I cannot say they will have as much of a direct impact on my current activities. However, the fact that I have learned about them has definitely provided me with a greater awareness of what to ask and look for when interacting with SEO/ Web teams/ agency counterparts.

Overall, the course was a very positive experience and I have really enjoyed learning about SSMM. The knowledge I have acquired will definitely help me in my current field but is definitely transferable to any other in this day and age where everything is going digital and online.

See you all online!

I’ve seen the practise of SEO described as both an art and as a science, and indeed one of my primary considerations when enrolling on the SSMM course at the University of Salford was to ensure I received an authoritative, impartial, and academically applied grounding in the subject rather than a purely commercial one.

Tackling a new art or science project can seem very daunting though, and as the weeks rolled by and multiple layers of influence in the online marketing sphere were revealed, it dawned on me how search engine marketing has many parallels with the world of sport – the concepts of which I can understand much more easily. My sport is football (soccer, if you must), but I think the principles can be extended to virtually any sport you follow – let me know if I’m wrong!

So how can a football team’s success on the pitch mirror a website’s performance on the Google playing field?

League Tables

The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) can be viewed in much the same way as a football league table – the most successful at the top, and with each page back, we can think of lower and lower divisions in the football pyramid. Just as smaller clubs still have their own supporters, so less well-optimised websites will still possess devotees, but the “big boys” at the top will continue to attract the majority of attention and new fans. It is thus the ultimate goal of each club to move up the rankings and become number one.

The Tactical Battle

Christmas trees, diamond midfields, flat back-fours, 4-4-2 or 4-3-3? If these don’t sound familiar to you then they are a selection of tactical formations football manager’s choose to line up their teams, in the hope they will best perform in that way.

A website owner needs to employ tactics in the same way, from how their site is structured (about Sitemaps) to the keyword strategy they employ. Keywords are like the best players on your team, and you want them to control the action on your website, so it is important you select the most “talented” ones you can – and play them in their strongest positions!

A number of tools are available for keyword research, and just as football clubs scout for new players – website owners need to search for terms which will strengthen their “keyword squad”.

Football managers will often check out their opposition to gain a measure of their relative strengths and weaknesses, and via tools such as Open Site Explorer, online marketing managers can do the same to gain a competitive edge.

Style of Play

In order to engage fans and keep them paying at the turnstiles, it is important to offer them a good experience. A fluid style of play with dashes of flair and inspiration, allied to displays of commitment and honesty will satisfy most football fans – and so too, quality content must be the basis of any website aiming to attract supporters and to keep them. Provide a dull, dreary slog and don’t expect to sell many season tickets.

Optimisation of imagery, copy and load speeds are fundamental to an online operation, and a grasp of the basics with a clear vision of how a site “should” work are required before any grand notions of growth and progress are considered.

Giant Killing

Unless your team is blessed with the backing of a billionaire benefactor, getting to the top and staying there is perhaps unrealistic, as the resources available to you cannot compete. Every season though, we hear of David versus Goliath clashes where the little guy wins.

Aristotle spoke of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, and this in football relates to teamwork – everyone pulling in the same direction, with no prima donnas or shirkers in the team.

In the field of marketing, if all aspects of the business are “on message” then success is more achievable. In the online competition for Page ranking, niche or well reasoned keywords can bring success to smaller enterprises who cannot compete head on with large multinationals.

Resting on Laurels

Once a level of success has been achieved, it must be tempting to soak up the glory of a job well done. Be warned though, the competition does not sit still. After a long journey to the top, and will more resources to call upon than most, Manchester City were satisfied with their squad and playing style and changed very little form the formula which brought them success. Their rivals though, Manchester United, invested and adapted resulting in a reversal of fortunes for the neighbouring clubs in the following campaign.

Liverpool F.C., for so long the dominant force in English football, failed to move on from their last championship-winning team and allowed it to become old and stale – they have never fully recovered since, as rivals became more successful and generated more revenue.

Huge high street stores such as Comet and HMV have both failed to move on with the development of online business to disastrous effect.

It is strategically vital to nurture a website in line with developments in the industry and market place, because being left behind can have dire consequences to the visibility and hence profitability of internet traders.

Rules of the Game

Football has a host of governing bodies from FIFA on the world stage, to UEFA in Europe and the FA in England. All have regulations, but the game has generally consistent rules of play which all must obey.

Search Engine Optimisation has no official rule book, but, in the Western world at least, Google can realistically be viewed as the governing body. Such is Google’s dominance as the search engine of choice, that satisfying the demands of its “algorithm” (a tool employed to measure the authority and worth of websites) can be likened to playing by the rules.

Infringements to the laws of the game in football can result in penalties and suspensions, as can infringements to Google dictates when optimising websites. There are many cautionary tales on the web relating to Google’s “Panda” and “Penguin” penalties.

Just like the offside rule in football, Google’s considerations for it’s algorithm are widely confused – but if everything were clear cut and predictable, the beautiful game would not be so exciting, would it?!

This Manager’s Future

My client, Idyll Home, are a relatively young company, and I suppose could be considered a lower division team at present. There is plenty of talent and ambition there though, and I hope to utilise the skills and knowledge acquired on the #SSMMUOS course to push for year on year promotions to the Premier League!

One thing’s for certain about SEO though…it’s a funny old game!

The benefits of social learning

My name’s Zoe Breen and I’m producer of the WebWise a BBC* website which promotes adult digital literacy.

I’m also a blogger for Manchester Girl Geeks a group which aims to engage women and girls with science and technology.

Having produced websites for the BBC for 12 years I felt it was time I had a look at how my counterparts in the third sector and commercial worlds use search and social media marketing techniques.

A major perk of attending the Search and Social Media Marketing professional course at the University of Salford was the opportunity to network with people from a wide range of backgrounds.

I got to benefit from the knowledge of  a public relations expert, someone working at a creative agency, marketing professionals,  a local authority media manager and the UK’s foremost Yorkshire pudding blogger!

The Search and Social Media LinkedIn group set up for the course has been a great forum for asking questions, debating issues and sharing knowledge and ideas.

Experiments in generating social capital

It was a post in the LinkedIn group by fellow student Liezl Hesketh that got me thinking about the value of my personal social media activity.

Liezl highlighted a news piece from online magazine TechCrunch which reported that airline Cathay Pacific were offering free business lounge access to anyone who could prove they had earned a score of 40 or more on social influence website Klout.

I hadn’t checked my Klout account for a while so was delighted to see that I had a score of 46. Not only did I qualify for business lounge access, but that I had the basis of my end of course presentation.

Looking back at my social media activity, I realised that I had employed a variety of techniques over the years to boost my rating on social influence websites like Klout and PeerIndex – sites that generate a score reflecting your reach and activity across a number of social media platforms.

Raise your personal web profile at low to no cost

Here are my top tips for boosting your personal web presence:

1. Plug your social media accounts into Klout or PeerIndex to keep an eye on your progress.
2. Set yourself targets, get your first 1,000 Twitter followers or aim to join the 500+ club on LinkedIn.
3. Use Twitter to engage with people who share your interests – follow, reply, favourite, retweet.
4. Create lists as a way to group related Twitter accounts to follow trends in a specific field.
5. Use a tool like paper.li to automatically generate an online newspaper from your Twitter list or other social media platforms.

Connect with me on Twitter as @ZoeEBreen and on LinkedIn

*Views expressed here do not represent those of my employer.

I’m coming to the end of my time on the Search and Social Media Marketing course at the Universtiy of Salford and it’s time to look back and analyse what I’ve learned and how I can best put it to use at work.

Let me start off by introducing myself . I‘m Rachael and I currently work in a full mix marketing role for international student recruitment at the University of Salford. My role involves all elements of the marketing mix from marketing and advertising strategy to marketing communications to writing for the web to finally….social media!

My experience of social media is somewhat of a mixed bag. Personally I’m a big user of social media with profiles on facebook, twitter, linkedin, bebo(i know, im too old), pinterest…..but professionally there have been some nerves. This is where the course has informed me and given me some ideas for future working. But let’s start at the beginning.

Where are we now?

Working for a large public sector organisation, we’re not the most dynamic or organised when it comes to embracing “new technologies” on a wide scale. What tends to happen, which I suspect may be the same across many industries, is that you have a large handful of people across the organisation who are particularly interested in social media (and I count myself in this group) who try to use this for professional purposes. And then you have the rest!!! There is somewhat of an ingrained fear that there are so many platforms we wouldn’t know where to start or that we will post something unsuitable, and inadvertently take down the organisation in one foul tweet, which all too often results in an “if you can’t do it all, do nothing” approach.

So, what happens?

When there is a culture like this I suppose it makes sense that we stick to the main platforms that even the most anti-social media among us have had some exposure to, ie Facebook and Twitter. This at the very least gives us a social media presence if only for back and forth communication on a small scale.

What should we do?

This is where I feel the search and social media marketing course has made a real impact on my thinking. I felt at beginning the course that I had quite a decent knowledge of social media. However, what I’ve been missing, and what I feel many marketers in a role like mine are probably missing is the importance of the “search” aspect. This one element should inform the whole of the rest of the strategy – both social and other! Tools like SEOMOZ and Opensiteexplorer, the classic Google analytics and tweetdeck newer tools like found can and should first be used to determine what your customers are searching for and how and most importantly if you’re website and social presence is measuring up – this can then inform how and where you need to engage with them socially.

EG: At the moment we find that international students use our facebook page as a customer service type forum to ask questions . We have always put this down to the fact that the majority of our digital advertising is via facebook and therefore encourages this type of interaction – however, could this actually be a symptom of our website not delivering the answers or that our website is not ranking highly for the search terms they are entering?!

We also use twitter for a more “social” interaction, and I have to admit I’ve been slow to adapt this for the international market due to the nature of enquiry on facebook. I’ve fallen into the trap of fear that I won’t be able to respond in time and it will have a negative impact on our brand!!

The problem is with a small team, we can’t do it all. However, each week following our class I come home with a list as long as my arm of new tools to try new ways of optimizing, new link building ideas and the strong feeling that we are way behind where we need to be.

So, how do we change this?

Well, I think the first step is to look at your target market and look at all of the social media channels available to them. For me, working with international enquirers and applicants I need to be aware of what channels they are using not only to search for courses and universities but also to get more information be it from the uni or from peers. How are they searching? What are the lead in times for the conversion of an international student ie how long before the start of a course do they start to research? Are they using directory sites or are they going straight to google/bing etc. Are they using long or short tail searches? What course titles make sense internationally? Do they search in English or in their own language? Are they social media savvi or would they prefer the traditional contact of email and phone?

It is knowing the answers to these questions that will inform a future social media strategy for the sake of international student recruitment.

And most importantly I need to remember…. you don’t need to be on every platform, just be where your customers expect you to be! Easy eh? I’ll keep you posted on my progress. Thanks for reading.

My initial motivation for joining this Search and Social Media Marketing course was to learn about social media and how I could leverage it as part of my marketing planning when I was ready to start a website to become an entrepreneur.

Build a website for free?

Unfortunately I am starting from grassroots level, and I don’t even know how to make a web page.  Well, not quite true.  My thoughts were :  “How can I get a website for free ?”, so I went on a 1-day WordPress course to learn to do it myself.  But of course to start a website like I am planning, will require far more complexity and development, whilst also considering other important aspects such as SEO factors, how to build in marketing planning upfront, and not forgetting about social media and its impacts.

I did manage to do one trial and start a website – a little website – for a charity I run called Children of Africa.  It’s not quite complete, but do take a look – this is what can be built in a day.  Of course it is still missing rather a lot of necessary website content, but that will come in time.

Impact of the course on my planning

I have been blown away at how much I have learnt over the past 10 weeks.  My approach on how to make a web page has been dramatically altered.  I would never have understood the importance of website content, about social media and how powerful it can be, or how to think about the marketing planning upfront.

I hope to start working on my new website very soon.  The planning is going very well, and I am trying to incorporate everything from the course as I go along.  I believe I have identified a niche in the market, and really hope that I will be able to capitalise on that, to provide a service that almost every home-owner may want to consider at some point in time.

I promise that this budding entrepreneur will return and update this article once it is up and running, but until then you can either follow the journey on my blog, or just … Watch this space!

I initially joined the search and social media course at Salford University to update my knowledge on how best to attract and engage with the potential new customers in Manchester, and therefore grow my business. My business is Blush Dance, a pole dance, aerial fitness and burlesque dance studio, we have a website and all the usual social media platforms, where we post pictures from classes, videos of our dance performances and parties. Most of our class participants find us online, however I was keen to use all of these formats together with more effect so I signed up to the course to help me understand how I could do the online thing with much more sass.

In four weeks I have acquired new knowledge and implemented strategies to help improve my online marketing. For example I learnt my website ranked in the first 4 listings on google for keywords such as Pole Dance Classes in Manchester, however search pole dancing lessons and we were only just making the first page. Using tools such as the keyword master and searching incognito in Google chrome proved a healthy way to monitor how we were being viewed by potential clients, and how they were searching for us.

I have learnt the importance of good content and am putting into practice how to work my keywords into interesting articles to engage and attract customers to my website. I am improving my ability to getting all the key words in the right order, and finding high authority websites which are interested in publishing content about increasing dance skills, strength, co-ordination or flexibility. I have started with our current clients, a list of dance studios offering a range of lessons. I checked their page authority through opensiteexplorer and I will be writing interesting articles for their clients, which integrates keywords to create reciprocal links and help increase traffic between both businesses.

I was already sold on the importance of social media for business marketing, we daily engage with our dance students via facebook and twitter. In the past I have received direct sales from both facebook and twitter, so I particularly enjoyed learning about socialmention and twitter chat. I plan on using these to check the strength of my brands’ social media presence. I will be putting together a strategy and setting targets to monitor my websites progress. I will also be using Twitter chat to enable me to discover the pole and aerial fanatics who are engaging in discussions surrounding my expertise on twitter and also plan on hosting my own pole and aerial dance twitter chats.

So thanks to all the help from the industry experts, peers and tutors at Salford University I now have more knowledge and confidence to put together an online marketing strategy for my dance business and lots of new knowledge and goals to improve our online presence.

Hit by Google Panda? Problems with SEO? Poor ranking web site?

These were some of the issues my company Dayinsure had. Dayinsure usually ranked well for most search terms but in particular Temporary Car Insurance and Short Term Car Insurance, were always listed in the top 3 of SERPs.

Thanks Google Panda!! At the end of February 2012, our visitor numbers suddenly dropped by around 60%. Some of our more long tail keywords hadn’t changed but our main search terms had plummeted down the rankings. Our current SEO company, although helping with good rankings for our long tail keywords, couldn’t seem to repair our Google Panda hit!

SEO for most businesses is quite a scary subject, or dark art as some call it but as an I.T. company, we wanted to try and understand it. We looked for courses that may help us and found that the University of Salford run a Search and Social Media Marketing course, so I booked onto it.

The training takes place at Media City in Manchester and is a fantastic place to learn. And right from the start, you realise that SEO is not as scary as first thought. If there is one thing to take from the course, it’s the words, “Content is King”. Content is so important. Reading it, sharing it, liking it, tweeting it or blogging about it. How ever your content is used, it’s important when your write it that it is relevant to the subject and is written in a natural matter so no keyword stuffing etc.

The course has helped us to understand the correct way to implement SEO. I’m not an SEO expert yet but having a basic understanding of the rules and the things that you should be doing really help. Attending this course will help you communicate with your SEO agency in better ways or allow you to bring SEO in-house, just be aware that SEO is not something you should do if you have a spare couple of hours here and there. You need to spend a lot of time on SEO in keyword research, writing content, internal and external link building, social media and others.

I would recommend this course to anybody who has been hit by Panda or Penguin, or anyone who just wants to understand SEO. One other great thing about the course is the industry experts each week. These experts spend over an hour each week explaining their industry expertise and how you can apply the same techniques. You can even ask them advice about your own web site and they are more than happy to help.

Have you been hit by a Google Algorithm update or have a similar story? Ask me a question or just get yourself on the next course!